Christmas: An Event That Happened

Homemade Christmas cookies in the shape of gingerbread men and dinosaurs on parchment paper on a cooling tray. The icing and sprinkles are a bit messy.

The :[ expression on the gingerbread person in the upper right matches my own mood more than I’d like to admit.

Hey friends! Warning in advance this one ended up being a bit ramble-y, even by my standards. šŸ™‚

Itā€™s Christmas! For another…hour-ish, Pacific time.Listen, I didnā€™t get around to blogging until late today. But now Iā€™m here with hot chocolate with whiskey in it, ready to write a few words.

This Christmas has managed to average out to mediocre, which Iā€™m taking as something of a win. Hereā€™s a rundown of the actual events, such as they are:

Visited Davis

I headed back to Davis, CA, the worldā€™s most scientifically-advanced cow town and also my hometown, to visit my mom for a few days. It turns out I still hate flying from an airports/logistics stress perspective, and I forgot to take Dramamine on my flight to California and kicked off being low-key nauseated for most of the time I was there.

Seeing my hometown was nice and I managed to pop into a few businesses I have fond memories of. Bizarro World, the comics/games shop, had a slimmer used RPG section than Iā€™m used to them having, but there were still a few interesting games. Turns out there was an entire Starship Troopers RPG, including a bunch of splat books! I also headed to the thrift store (nothing too interesting, a copy of Pokemon Shield was available but I didnā€™t ask the price), and the Avid Reader, a very nice local bookstore. I didnā€™t pick anything up for myself because the monetary squeeze from unemployment is really starting to hit. My mother was very kind and bought me a signed copy of Patrick Rothfussā€™s The Narrow Road Between Desires, which Iā€™m looking forward to reading.

The main event as such while I was there was sorting through my Dadā€™s old clothes to see what I might like to keep and what weā€™re going to give away, and also going through a bunch of childhood stuff stored in the closet of my old bedroom. Neither was the most fun thing Iā€™ve ever done, through the childhood stuff sorting was definitely the easier thing. Itā€™s not nearly done, though, so Iā€™ll need to go back and finish some other time. I didnā€™t end up bringing too much back in my luggage, but I hauled a number of newly-inherited clothing items that I hope will be in rotation soon.

I came back to Seattle on the 21st, greeted by an extra toasty apartment and an iguana who probably didnā€™t appreciate at all that I left the heat up for her while I was gone. It was wonderful to see her again, though. I missed my angry mini-dinosaur quite a bit even though I was only gone for a few days.

Christmas Eve

None of my friends ended up planning any sort of party, and last year I spent Christmas Eve (and morning) with my ex Mā€™s local family members, so I couldnā€™t really do a repeat of last year. Which is a shame, because it was really really nice to get to do the whole cozy Christmas Eve thing (decorating a tree, etc.) with a family and feel warm and welcome and all that. Sigh.

What I did end up doing was making Christmas cookies for myself with limited success (see picture above). The base cookie was good but took way longer in the oven than the recipe said, but maybe I overbaked them. They didnā€™t end up all dry or anything, so Iā€™m not sure. The icing wasnā€™t great, though. Good enough when on the cookie, but as a standalone it had kind of a…tang, I guess. The corn syrup used as part of it had vanilla in it, which I think might have thrown off the balance of the flavors towards a slight alcoholic/extract-y undertaste. Also it turns out I donā€™t actually own any Christmas-y cookie cutters besides the gingerbread men, so I ended up using the dinosaur ones I do own. Theyā€™re Christmas dinosaurs. Roll with it. >.>;;;

Besides that I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time, and loved it. A couple friends and I had a discord call in lieu of our usual RPG game because so many people had to tap out, where we talked about potential RPGs for a side podcast project. Perhaps not the ideal evening, but good all things considered. And certainly better than spending it totally isolated, which I worried would be what happened.

Christmas Day

Today! Fewer things happened today. I opened the presents my mom sent home with me and got a cute pair of (knee high, yay!) socks and Legends & Lattes, a sweet, lovely book by Travis Baldree. After eating breakfast and finishing the muppet movie (Iā€™d started nodding off during the last half hour the night before), I spent a chunk of the day reading straight through L&L while sipping coffee and finishing more of the cookies.

Later on I had a call with my mom and sister over Zoom. Getting a chance to talk to my sister is always nice, as we donā€™t talk very often despite getting along well. Our lives are in very different places, based on a combination of a moderately large age gap (8 years) and our divergent circumstances. Sheā€™s been married for quite a while and has three kids. Iā€™ve managed to somehow not find my marriageable person/people despite my best efforts for 15+ years and my angry teen-esque iguana is about as close as Iā€™ll likely get to having kids. So yeah, different! Always good to catch up nonetheless.

I did manage to continue a couple of traditions today despite flying solo. I had Christmas Tacos, a tradition from my dadā€™s side of the family that came about from my grandmother being sick of all of the effort it took to make Christmas dinner and all of us going ā€œyā€™know, we all like tacos and would be happy to just do that instead.ā€ I also made myself a more traditional Christmas dinner (the tacos were lunch) with ham and cranberry sauce and roasted vegetables and potatoes, but that was for fun. And I engaged in the most important tradition of all, watching A Charlie Brown Christmas, something I started doing in 2020 as a way to make lockdown feel Christmas-y and have made a point of keeping up ever since.

~ * ~ * ~

That was a way longer recap than I intended, sorry yā€™all…

In the end, Christmas was rough emotionally this year in a lot of ways. It drove home a lot of the things I lost due to the breakup, from events/people I enjoyed to having someone special who could support me (and I support them) during the holiday stressors. Iā€™m not fully over the breakup yet, but the last couple weeks re-opened that wound somewhat in a way I wasnā€™t expecting. I also ended up feeling more isolated than usual, due in art to not having much holiday stuff to get caught up in. I like being social, and I actually really like holidays, but it didnā€™t gel together this year. Next year I might need to be the change I want to see in the world, so to speak. Even though I personally find the idea of planning and running a Christmas party as a person who lives on their own to be very daunting.

Still, I survived and had some good moments mixed in. Iā€™m not sure Iā€™ll take that as a win, but I didnā€™t fully lose either, and thatā€™s something.

Merry Christmas! Hereā€™s hoping yours went better than mine, and that we both have even better ones next year. <3

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What I’m Currently Verbing

A still from It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown

Spoilers! Jesus…

This is all the stuff I’ve been experiencing lately on the media front! It was originally a section of Mondayā€™s post, but it got so long itā€™s a standalone now. What an exciting time to be alive.

~ * ~ * ~

Reading

I finished The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson a bit back and found myself drawn to dive into the next book, which is unusual for me with epic fantasy. The audiobook format probably helps quite a bit. As such, Iā€™ve started wading into the second book of the series, Words of Radiance, and after listening to the first handful of minutes and then putting it down for like two weeks Iā€™m now properly chugging along. Itā€™s nice reading them back to back, because everythingā€™s fresh and I had the unique joy of going ā€œhey, itā€™s that asshole!ā€ about a minor character showing back up whose name I probably wouldnā€™t have remembered with more of a lag between readings.

Iā€™m also very close to being done with The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. The only issue is that it makes me very sleepy much of the time when Iā€™m reading it. Not a slag on the book, Iā€™ve just been tired lately and unlike with audiobooks I canā€™t be doing other physical stuff while I read, so Iā€™m more susceptible to fall towards slumber, especially given I often am reading this one in bed just before going to sleep.

Tools of the Titans by Tim Ferris has fallen by the wayside. Thereā€™s nothing wrong with it on its own, but there were a few too many interview subjects in a row making blanket absolutist proclamations about signs of health in the section I was reading and I got tired of it. I think I just hit a rough patch of the book, honestly. Iā€™m not feeling up to absorbing more health stuff right now while staying on top of my properly-skeptical game, and the ebook format makes it hard for me to casually skip ahead to the not-health sections and come back to it later. Iā€™ll likely get back into it at some point. Just generally burnt out right now and I donā€™t think that book would help.

Watching

I did watch Itā€™s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown for Halloween. I donā€™t have any brilliant observations on it, story-wise. I was struck by the animation, specifically the painted (I think?) backgrounds. They add texture to the animation while still integrating well with the crisply drawn characters and make the whole process feel like a labor of love and art. I also had that vibe from the Christmas special. On both they could have just been quick cash ins, but they feel like the creators really wanted to make something special and took it seriously, and that comes through in the work.

Iā€™ve been watching Black Sails. Finished Season 1, a few episodes into Season 2. I like it! People actually mostly have understandable motivations for the terrible things they do to each other, and those terrible things take a clear toll on them emotionally, which is a lovely change from a lot of stories. I also was reading some bit about the series and they were like ā€œhey itā€™s a prequel to Treasure Islandā€ which immediately made me go ā€œwait, what?ā€ followed by ā€œhuh I guess I know who definitely survives now.ā€ Which isnā€™t a bad thing at all, even if by then looking at the Treasure Island wikipedia page I learned before it was revealed on the show that a character I suspected hadnā€™t actually died did, in fact, survive.

Iā€™m somewhat waiting for the show to fall flat on its face when it comes to characterization and plot between now and the end of the series, because almost no show makes it four seasons with tight writing, even if theyā€™re short seasons. But hopefully theyā€™ll keep it together. As is, itā€™s not a perfect show, but thereā€™s no enormous missteps that make me want to stop watching, so good for ā€˜em.

Itā€™s also gorgeous. The costumers, props folks, and set designers deserve many awards.

Outside of that itā€™s been mostly MissieMaeā€™s Fallout: New Vegas Letā€™s Plays and Ghostwizardsā€™s Phoenix Point Twitch streams. Sometimes you just need that good good parasocial time, especially when living alone and not having a job to go to/coworkers to talk with. Itā€™s reminding me some of my experience with media consumption during the pandemic, which isnā€™t a great mindspace to brush up against, but so it goes.

Listening

Podcasts

Iā€™ve been doing a re-listen of Failure to Adapt, a lovely podcast about adaptations from books to other mediums thatā€™s fun and light with great chemistry between the hosts. I also caught up on The Film Reroll, and was very excited when I saw they did Itā€™s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown for Halloween. It was great! Everyone is good, and Andy Hoover is an eternal gem who I hope I get to work with someday.

Beyond that itā€™s the usual weekly suspects, e.g. Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, and Wait Wait Donā€™t Tell Me. Iā€™ve also been enjoying If Books Could Kill when new episodes drop, and have caught a few of the new episodes of Youā€™re Wrong About, though Iā€™m hopelessly behind on that one.

Music

Iā€™m mostly being Basic and listening to a couple of cafe/smooth jazz/bossa nova/etc. live channels and Lofi Girl chillout. I should really listen to more music again instead of just constantly mainlining podcasts, but living alone and being unemployed having something more for my brain to latch onto than just music is usually a good thing.

Playing

Video Games

Baldurā€™s Gate 3 is dominating my video/computer game space. Iā€™m about fifty five hours in now, stumbling along through Act 2. Iā€™m annoyed I think I missed my romance chance with some characters, but Iā€™m hoping if only from a game design perspective that Iā€™ll get a second chance to initiate things. That said, I wish it was more clear how to just be friends with members of this pack of chaos dorks. The expression on Wyllā€™s face when I was like ā€œI would like to not make out with you, kthnxā€ was heartbreaking and Iā€™d rather have just had an option to, I dunno, have a nice tender moment of a more platonic variety to end the scene.

I would also settle for it being flagged if you could get with multiple characters without it being a problem.

Also one of the side characters in the camp will just fucking roast you for not hooking up with anyone by a certain point in the game, which is hilarious but also made me want to go ā€œhey, fuck off.ā€ Only a little. I had a more polite response in-game, though.

I think I still have the chance to get with Karlach, though. Fingers crossed. Holdinā€™ out for a hellion!

Iā€™ve started clicking through some of the voice acting and just reading the text in conversations, which I feel bad about given the voice actingā€™s so good. Thereā€™s just a LOT of dialog and otherwise-voiced text in this game.

Tabletop

On the tabletop front I played Discworld: Ankh-Morpork with three friends recently. Iā€™ve never played that game with four players, and it plays very differently with 4 instead of 3, in a good way! Itā€™s harder for any one person to pull ahead, and it makes it hard to figure out which victory condition any given person is going for. It also gave me a chance to hang out with a friend I met through my ex for the first time since the breakup, and it was lovely to see him.

~ * ~ * ~

And thatā€™s it for now, folks! Next update is probably next week.

What have yā€™all been enjoying?

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Bloggerel Doggerel

An iguana in a bus tub full of water, taking a bath. She had one arm hooked over the side and is staring at the camera.

Jabberwocky would like everyone to know that baths are bad, actually. Even if I managed to catch her at a point she wasn’t harshly glaring.

(Despite the doggerel in the title, this post does not, in fact, have the form of comic verse. Moreā€™s the pity.)

Been a few weeks, so itā€™s update time again! Whee, updates.

~ * ~ * ~

Things have taken a turn for the rainy and cold in Seattle. Itā€™s quite lovely in a lot of ways, though the reduced sunlight has my bird brain getting sleepy more easily than before. But having my apartment stay at a decent temperature with the windows closed is a nice change. Whenever it gets sunny around here, I have to crack a window or this place shoots up into the mid to high 70s. The double-edged sword of facing south.

Hopefully spooky season treated everyone well. A friend of mine had a spooky brunch, which was a nice time, though I felt a little awkward given how few people I knew there, and how well many of them knew each other. Iā€™ve never been very good at joining in-person conversations already in progress, either, which didnā€™t help. I wish there was a social skills pack I could download into my brain, but in lieu of that Iā€™ll just need to keep working on it. On Halloween proper I watched Itā€™s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and ate probably-overpriced tiny candies. Turns out the only way I could get Reeseā€™s Pumpkins was to buy a bag of fun-sized candy. Worth it. We also recorded a somewhat-heavy Primary Attribute episode earlier in the evening, so having some candy and a silly cartoon was a nice counterpoint.

Onto some more specific stuff:

Job Search

Iā€™m still digging around for a job, like last time. Iā€™ve given in and finally started applying to IT positions, as my unemployment runs out at roughly the end of this month, so I canā€™t just keep crossing my fingers on library positions. Iā€™m extremely frustrated at the library job search going so poorly, especially given how many of the paraprofessional, not-Librarian jobs I applied to on top of the full librarianship gigs. Iā€™m perfectly willing to do a non-librarian library job for a year or so to get more experience to be a more competitive applicant for the full-on librarian positions, but if even those arenā€™t getting to the interview stage I feel stuck on how Iā€™m going to gain any of library experience they want at all. Right now, though, Iā€™m shifting into aiming for just getting a decent-paying job so I can get some stability again. Make some money so I can support myself making art, and all that. Iā€™ll try to keep looking for more library gigs in the future, though, and will keep applying even as I expand to IT jobs as well. Maybe Iā€™ll get lucky.

Jabberwocky, The Dread Iguana

Turns out her blood test looked like she had a low-level infection, so sheā€™s on a second course of antibiotics. Still getting baths every night, too. She hates ā€˜em still, along with hating getting an oral syringe of antibiotics in her mouth every other day. She seems to be holding up pretty well, though. Hopefully this second course of antibiotics will see her through. Both of us would love it if I stopped needing to medicate her like that.

Getting to see her get angry and frustrated at the evil bath every day is still funny, though. And kind of a nice bonding moment, in a weird way.

Iā€™m also finalizing an enclosure upgrade to her humidity setup Iā€™ve been working on for a long time. I think itā€™ll finally get done this week. One of those things that should have taken a weekend but instead has been worked on in drips and drabs for months and months. Iā€™m not very good at this, sometimes. :\

Programming

Iā€™ve been learning Python through the Python Crash Course book that No Starch Press put out a while ago. Iā€™ve made it through the first seven chapters, just chipping away at about half an hour every day-ish. Itā€™s more manageable that way. Itā€™s interesting programming again. Iā€™ve also become a terrible typist when it comes to programs, it seems, which is annoying. So many specific symbols being used so many odd places, I donā€™t have the flow like I do with just typing prose-like writing. That said, I do like exercising these parts of my brain again, and Iā€™m looking forward to the projects that make up the second half of the book. I havenā€™t made any large/complex programs since college, and I think those skills are the ones I really need to rebuild if I want to use this programming as a real job skill beyond knocking out some simple scripts to help with minor things.

What Iā€™m Reading/Watching/Listening/Playing

This section actually got so long Iā€™m making it into a standalone post thatā€™ll go up later this week! :O

~ * ~ * ~

And thatā€™s some of the highlights of where my life is at right now! Iā€™m hoping to put up another blog post later this week, beyond the media-focused one, but given my update schedule lately weā€™ll see how things go.

How have things been for you?

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Life Keeps Being Itself

A pictureo f the Seattle Skyline taken from Capitol Hill. The Space needle and downtown are visible in golden morning light.

I took this photo on my run this morning. It was a good time to catch the light.

I know I said in my last post I’d post later in the week. One week, six weeks, basically the same thing, right?

I used to do some good accountability on here, which I think I’ll start doing again. When I was flipping through old posts it was cool to see me checking in and my progress, and I’d like to have that record again. But for today it’s just going to be general updates, because it’s been so long.

Job Search
Still going! Going forever, going for life. I’m still applying to almost every library job I see (though I’m definitely missing a few). I’ve gotten basically zero interviews (except one with KCLS a few months ago), so I’m not sure how viable libraries are going to be for me in the short-term. I might, might break soon and start applying for IT/tech jobs again. Every time I look at doing IT Support Desk work again, though, it makes me sad. So I’m resisting.

I did take up doing some Python programming to build some skills in the interim. Plus if I could get into software development or infrastructure-related scripting that’d be neat. It’d be a good change and, frankly, probably pay better and be less stressful than support desk work. We’ll see how much I can pick up in the next few weeks, though.

Relationship
So, uh, that ended in early September. Just a few days shy of the 2-year mark. I started the breakup, she finished it. That’s…perhaps confusing but honestly I don’t want to get into it in detail. Hopefully it’s evocative as-is. I think it’s probably for the best long-term. It’s been a month since it happened and I’ve done a lot of the processing, but still getting used to it. I’m also not used to breakups not ending in “we’re still friends!” and that’s quite the adjustment. Anyway.

flails in “should be eloquent about this but isn’t”

The Great and Terrible Iguana
Jabberwocky the iguana is currently on a round of antibiotics, but I”m not too worried. The only sign of infection was dehydration, and the vet said that Jabberwocky looked great when I brought her in. I think the dehydration was just from her humidifier regularly running out and me letting it run dry for too long between refills, so her humidity dropped quite a bit. I’m being better about that, and they’re having me give her daily baths.

She hates the baths. So much. It’s hilarious.

I think she’s doing okay, though. We’ll be doing a followup appointment this week to see how stuff is going, so I’ll know for sure soon.

What I’m Reading/Watching/Playing
I want to go into more depth about these in the future, but here’s the quick list:

Playing: Baldur’s Gate 3, mostly. Played the multiplayer for Battletech with a friend last week and it was a very interesting experience.

Reading: Just finished Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age by Mathew Klickstein and Against the Dying of the Light (a F04 fanfic) by EthanTheRenegade and swanofmischief. Currently reading Tools of the Titans by Tim Ferris, The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman, and the audiobook of The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson.

Watching: Star Trek Discovery Season 2 (done) and 3 (in-progress). MissieMae’s Fallout: New Vegas playthrough. Also just watched Event Horizon with my friend on Friday night.

And that’s it for now! Will try to return later this week (so sometime between 1 and 43 days, apparently) with more updates.

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Extremely Minor Old Post Update

I happened to be trawling through my old posts and saw I’d made an archive PDF of an article wrong and never got around to fixing it. So I made a new one! If you were waiting on pins and needles for that PDF in this 2019 post to be updated, you’re in luck!

Essay Recommendation: How To Build A Fire

Also hello I am still alive and will do a bigger post this week.

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And We’re Back

I return!

Iā€™ve tried to write this post at least twice now, over the past year-ish. So now Iā€™m going to try and just write the short, FAQish and/or bullet points filled version of my comeback post.

Where did you go?

I mean, still Seattle. Moved out of the place I was in last time I posted, shared a building with good friends for a bit, and then moved to Capitol Hill to make it easier for my girlfriend and I to see each other.

Wait, girlfriend?

Yep. And weā€™re monogamous, so you all missed your chance. I know, youā€™re heartbroken.

So, like, what happened?

A bunch of people close to me died in quick succession at the start 2021. Okay, three, but thatā€™s still a lot. Jabberwocky made a feint for being the 4th, but pulled through, thankfully. There was also a pandemic, you might have noticed, and that was Not Good for my mental health. Neither was that apartment. So I couldnā€™t bring myself to write much.

Oh no, Jabberwocky!

Odd for that to be the thing you pulled out of there, but okay. No youā€™re avoiding the bigger thing. At any rate, sheā€™s still alive and well and has just fought off a long infection. As my friend puts it, sheā€™ll probably never die just out of pure anger. I maintain sheā€™ll bite, tail whip, and fight Death itself when it tries to come at her. She probably already has. So while sheā€™s an old lady at this point, sheā€™s doing pretty well.

What else happened while you were away?

Ah, finally, bullet points!

  • Transferred to an IT service desk job at the company I was working for. Got promoted after my first year. Did a pretty damn good job. Though I developed a skillset that gave me a lot of job security. Found out I was incorrect when 5 of the 8 members of the US team, including me, were laid off at the very start of May. It was, if Iā€™m being totally honest, a pretty bad place to work by the end there, so probably for the best. Still, I like my teammates from there and am sad I wonā€™t get to work with them anymore. Hell is best faced with a good team at your back, and it makes you closer and bond and shit.
  • Started dating a wonderful woman, been together for over a year, feels good. I promise this isnā€™t meant as a humblebrag, I Just want to give an important life event its due.
  • Got on much better brain meds that have seemingly kept working.
  • Got out of shape, back in, back out, back in. Something like that. Consistent working out is hard, though thankfully Iā€™m currently on an upswing.
  • Managed to not get COVID, at least as far as I and a multitude of anxiety-induced tests can tell.
  • Also got vaccinated, boosted, etc. If youā€™re not vaccinated: what the hell, go do that. Iā€™ll wait. Go!
  • Started a podcast! And itā€™s a good one! That’s still going! :O

Podcast?

Yeah! Itā€™s a Castles & Crusades actual play podcast called Primary Attribute. You can check it out at https://www.primaryattribute.com . Weā€™ve been at it a good long while now and have hit over 100 episodes. Castles & Crusades plays a lot like older editions of D&D, but we somehow turned it into something of a dating and civic maintenance simulator alongside the standard adventuring and occasional (*sniff* *single tear*) combat.

Also the audio for the first dozen-ish episodes sucks ass, so be warned. At least some remastering is in the works. I’ll post here when that’s done, if you want to hold out. Or try starting with Episode 83, “All Dream Copse are Bastards.” If you do that, let me know how jumping in there goes for you!

It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and for direct RSS subscription or download from the site itself. If you have a favorite platform we’re not on, let me know and I’ll see if I can make it happen.

Did you break the podcast details out into their own section to escape the bullet points?

You canā€™t prove anything.

Hey, I thought you said this was going to be short!

Yeah, but my morning pages practice has a word count of 500 words and I wanted to hit that. And we did! Mission accomplished, everyone go home.

Wait, are you going to start posting again?

Thatā€™s the hope! Thereā€™s a lot of stuff Iā€™ve wanted to write over the past couple years, but I felt like I needed to do this first. Does that make sense? No! But here we are.

And weā€™ll actually wrap here. See ya soon.

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Checking In

I’m alive. I’ve just had a whole bunch of stuff going down for the past like six months. Which I will unpack some other time. But I at least want y’all to know I did not evaporate completely. Not yet, at any rate.

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A Good Day to Blog

An image of a tree that's fallen on some power lines.

Seen on my run yesterday. Not the cause of *my* power outage, but I’m sure the cause of someone’s.

My internet’s been out for the past 36 hours. Except my phone, which doesn’t have enough bandwidth or data for me to do my day job. But you know what a phone connection is perfect for? Tethering to my computer and doing some blogging with. So here I am.

(My power was out for 12 hours on Wednesday morning as well, hence the sharing of the above image.)

I wrote a previous version of this post where I went into detail about the stressors in my life lately. But, honestly, I had a reaction of “I’m not sure I want to share all this” and “who would care to read about it in this much detail” while drafting it. So here we are, draft two: electric boogaloo.

I’m never sure what to do with days like this. I should probably clean my apartment. Despite some progress it’s still a mess and even though it’s already noon there’s still a lot of time left in the day. I’d work on editing the podcast, but pulling down everyone’s files is at least a few gigs and will be slow as molasses on this connection, so I kinda have to wait until everything’s back up. Or I could do some writing. Or some reading. I’ll probably do a combination of the four. Continue reading

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Rough Start

I’m writing this from under a cozy blanket on my couch, propped up on a good pillow, and wearing a nice warm fleece pullover. The space heater’s going again after keeping it off most of the day, and I’m starting to feel a little more mellow without, hopefully, nodding off. It’s a nice mental space to be in, especially since it’s been a rough start to the year.

Not as rough as many people’s, I’m sure. But there’s been stress. Mostly my anxiety messing things up for me, as previously mentioned. I got ultra-stressed about how to do laundry so things would be “clean” (my mom helped reassure me, thank you, Mom). Last night I lost an hour to (mostly fruitlessly) researching what cleaners would be food-surface safe. And another couple hours to wrestling with a bunch of indecision when finally buying enclosure supplies for Jabberwocky that I’ve needed ever since I moved. Continue reading

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The Start of Things

The starting screen/text of the game Zork.

The start of a somewhat different thing.

I decided on a lark today that it might be fun to blog more this year. That’s the only goal I’m going to official commit to: just do more posts than last year. Which shouldn’t be hard. I’m currently thinking daily or near-daily, and I want to give that a shot, but we’ll see how it goes. It might end up being once a week. Hell, if it ends up being once a month I’ll beat it. It looks like I only posted 11 times last year.

Today is, obviously, the start of the New Year, assuming you go by the Gregorian calendar system. I’m sure a lot of people are making resolutions and all that. I haven’t really, yet. I want to set goals, but I don’t want to rush it, and I want time to properly think them through. Instead of throwing together a list today and then failing in at least one thing on the first day because I didn’t consider my time/energy/spoons enough. Hopefully I’ll manage to do that this weekend.

The real trick of it is going to be managing expectations while there’s still a pandemic going on. It’s a lot of extra psychic pressure, which in turn limits my ability to do as much as I’d like. Even just not being able to get out of the house to go to a coffee shop or something is an obstacle. I used to do a ton of writing in a couple of weekly writing groups at coffee shops, for example. So I’m not going to have access to as many of my mental tools as I’m used to, and will be stressed on top of it. So I should be relatively gentle with my expectations and goals, allow for potential failure (and not let it stop me), and ramp up as needed. Continue reading

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